Kamakazie Sith wrote:No, I think their reasons are mostly brought on due to the people. The american people strike me as bi-polar. I can't tell you how many times as a police officer I've had victims demand that I violate the rights of another...but you know damn well they'd be the first to sue my ass if I violated their rights.
This is, to be fair, a huge problem. There's a... lack of mutual respect in the current culture, a refusal to accept that other people have a right to the same basic dignity and courtesy that we'd want for ourselves. Though I suppose that's always been there.
Have you ever heard of police being sued because they failed to prevent a burglary or some such? Because that's the most likely guideline I can think of, and I suspect that that's the precedent the courts would have in mind.
I'm pretty sure any such lawsuit against the TSA or the airlines would get laughed out of court.
I've heard of them, but I can't find anything regarding these lawsuits.
Have you heard of the police losing the suit?
Here I'm not asking for specific references, just for whether you've heard anything along those lines.
The TSA shouldn't get out of having to deal with the same problems. If the 'security' establishment had the same respect for the Constitution they swear by that law enforcement does, they wouldn't have been able to get away with doing it for so long.
It boggles my mind how they are able to get away with it up until now. It's like something clicked and people realized. "Hey, I can sue them"
This is why I'm so dubious of the "argument from litigous American behavior" thing (which, yes, you've pretty much dropped and I'm not trying to jump up and down on you about it). While Americans are quick to sue for
some things, they are slow to sue for others.
On some level I have a sneaking suspicion that America's lawsuit-happy tendencies come in part from the fact that people don't really feel they have a means of recourse other than the civil courts. It's gotten to the point where it might well be easier to convince the courts that you've suffered financial damage (and deserve compensation) than that your rights have been violated.
On a fairly unrelated note, I have had a sudden epiphany about what Julian Assange was talking about in that Time magazine interview lately when he talked about the "fiscalization" of Western society: the recasting of power relationships into monetary terms.
In a society where the government's duty is to distribute justice and the system is set up to make them do so, you will expect to see very careful monitoring of whether citizens' rights are honored. It isn't about the money, it's about the principle of the things, and the government's obligation to the governed.
But imagine if instead we recast everything in terms of economic interests. Suddenly, a citizen's
rights become less important: they have no definable cash value because they are priceless (and therefore worthless in the eyes of a hypothetical economist). But heaven forbid you should impinge on someone's
economic rights; if you cost them money they might sue.
The problem is that the government no longer has that same obligation to the governed; as long as the money continues to roll in it's assumed to be doing its job.
Most of the restraints on police that you now have to work with were passed in what, I speculate, was a more rights-oriented and less money-oriented era. But today, it has become much more difficult to get a point-blank declaration that the government is impinging on someone's rights. And it has become even more difficult to get the government to declare that a powerful entity (an agency or corporation) has committed a serious crime that people should go to jail for.
At which point the only recourse the citizens have is to sue whoever has the deepest pockets and hope to extract enough money that they, personally, can survive whatever went wrong.
(This may be gibberish; I'm suffering from some sleep deprivation. I hope it makes sense).
I cannot find the place where you have said that you can do so, or that you cannot do so.
I explained what implied consent means to law enforcement and your drivers license. To directly answer you. No, I can not search a trunk. I can seize a chemical sample if I have cause to suspect you of a DUI.
All right; that's what I thought. Thank you.
My original point was that the implied consent is
strictly limited to what, as a layman, I would call "DUI-related evidence:" the chemical sample. The fact that I'm on the road at all implies that I have consented to be searched in a specific fashion (various chemical tests) for a specific thing (drunkenness while driving).
I was then trying to carry on from this to say that this shows the limits of what "implied consent" can mean: it only applies to specific categories of searches that pass a strict test of reasonableness. Therefore, it cannot be used to justify whatever arbitrary form of search the TSA thinks up next. What kinds of searches airline travelers have "implicitly consented" to should be a matter to be settled by the courts and the legislature, not a fake-law-enforcement body like the TSA.
We seem to be in agreement on this point; it just took quite a while for us to move the discussion to a point where I could tell that you agreed with me.
